2007 — 16 Feb: time to visit the bank

We shall see, later today, if my bank has made any progress at all in getting hold of my title deeds. After all, they've only had two weeks (where
they supposedly require 24 hours notice).

Well, there's another 40 minutes of my life gone. At least they now admit that they have some record of me clearing the mortgage back in August 2000. But it appears that that
was almost exactly synchronous with the demand of Head Orifice that all deeds be sent in to a central record-keeping facility from each individual branch. Mind you, they were
fully convinced they'd find the dirty deeds down in the safe in their basement. I've now been promised a free coffee on my next weekly visit. To add minor insult to
this misdeed, they also firmly denied me the opportunity to pay in my brother's cheque for half the cost of his blessed scanner as the crumpled cheque he handed over to me
before flitting the coop was payable to him, despite the
endorsement he'd scrawled1 on the back. And then the uncalculated extra delay meant we paid a staggering £2-40 in the car park, too.

It's not all bad news, though. She who must be adored was very taken with what She saw of the various Macs in the new Apple Store, though she has been as firm as my bank in
declaring the 30" display a step too far. But she'd prefer me to buy from John Lewis as she "gets points" — and we all know what points mean, don't we? Prizes!

Scrabbling for Victory

Was that a certain ex-Warwick now IBM Hursley employee I glimpsed briefly in the background on the Marcus Brigstocke BBC4 TV programme about the UK Scrabble championship yesterday
evening, by the way?

In other scrabbling, did everyone enjoy applying the 17MB or so of critical XP patches this week? (27MB or so on Her machine as She will insist on running Word as well.) I
observe that my latest Ubuntu installation goes sailing on untroubled by such matters (as do "Macs" if you believe2 the ads, of course).

Anti-Trident? Sign here!

Staying with the theme of security and patches,
did you know that nice Mr Blair has a system that lets you sign a petition against the renewal of the
(palpably insane) Trident nuclear weapons system? Why not give it a whirl? I was number 12,609 this morning. The deadline (unfortunate phrase) is tomorrow, by the way.

Day 105

Footnotes

1 If only I'd kept my big mouth shut, of course, as the third temporary relief teller in as many weeks (who hadn't noticed
the difference in initials between self and Big Bro) had already stamped my Paying-In book...
2 I don't think I've believed an ad since I stopped wondering where the yellow went having brushed my teeth with Pepsodent!